image: Gerwyn Davies
Join the Queer(y)ing Creative Practice group for a lunchtime conversation about CAMP in contemporary creative practice
WHEN: 12:30-1:30 Tuesday 23 October 2018
WHERE: RMIT Building 6, Level 3, Room 19 (knock on the Level 3 glass door for access!)
Bring your lunch and join us for a round table conversation on camp in contemporary creative practice. Cups of tea provided!
How do you think about camp in your creative practice? Share your work and ideas with us and help us get a sense of what camp means now. We also invite you to share your work with us by adding images to this Slides document.
Ray Cook and Alison Bennett are working on an exhibition on this theme and we would love you to help us to develop our thinking on this question.
Widgets and Doohickies from a Camp toolbox
PROJECT SPACE SPARE ROOM / 31 January to 28 February (Opening Thursday 31 January 5-7pm)
This exhibition considers camp to be an unstable suite of strategies available to the non-mainstream. Working models of camp become tools for artists, individuals and communities alike to negotiate assertive pathways through marginalisation.
“Definitions of camp are many and varied. Susan Sontag claimed that it is a passive, apolitical worldview providing homosexuals with solace in isolation. Moe Meyers’ declared camp stood in opposition to compulsory heteronormativity, and also to the capitulation by gay and lesbian assimilationists. For Meyer, camp is queer praxis and heterosexual appropriations are theft.
This exhibition, curated by Dr Ray Cook and Dr Alison Bennett, considers camp to be an unstable suite of strategies available to the non-mainstream. Working models of camp become tools for artists, individuals and communities alike to negotiate assertive pathways through marginalisation. Historically the contents of the camp toolbox have been used to construct affirmation, connection, languages of dissent, the articulation of subcultural particularity—these are tools with which to acquire social and cultural space. Traditionally the toolbox has included fatalism, euphemism, theatricality, irony, exaggeration and the strategic pretence of incomprehension. All ideal instruments to invert mainstream hierarchies of value and taste.
The contours, dimensions and textures of sexual and gendered subcultures have been transformed by new social attitudes with levels of legitimacy that would be unthinkable only a few years ago. Though as LGBTIQA+ identities and cultures mainstream, new inequalities emerge, new generational and factional discontinuities and dissonance arise. This exhibition asks what insights might be gained from a look in the toolbox of a number of artists who approach their task from a variety of vantages.”
https://www.intersect.rmit.edu.au/-ps-sr-/widgets-and-doohickies/
FYI, further reading:
Susan Sontag 1964 ‘Notes on Camp’
Horn, K 2017, ‘History & theory of Camp‘
The Queer(y)ing Creative Practice is presented by CAST and coordinated by Dr Alison Bennett, RMIT School of Art alison.bennett@rmit.edu.au
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